Massacres

Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology Approaches

Cheryl P. Anderson, Debra L. Martin

• Publisher: University of Florida Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781683400752
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume integrates data from researchers in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology to explain when and why group-targeted violence occurs. Massacres have plagued both ancient and modern societies, and by analyzing skeletal remains from these events within their broader cultural and historical contexts this volume opens up important new understandings of the underlying social processes that continue to lead to these tragedies. In case studies that include Crow Creek in South Dakota, Khmer Rouge–era Cambodia, the Peruvian Andes, the Tennessee River Valley, and northern Uganda, contributors demonstrate that massacres are a process—a nonrandom pattern of events that precede the acts of violence and continue long afterward. They also show that massacres have varying aims and are driven by culture-specific forces and logic, ranging from small events to cases of genocide. Many of these studies examine bones found in mass graves, while others focus on victims whose bodies have never been buried. Notably, they also expand widely held definitions of massacres to include structural violence, featuring the radical argument that the large-scale death of undocumented migrants in Arizona's Sonoran Desert should be viewed as an extended massacre. This is the first volume to focus exclusively on massacres as a unique form of violence. Its interdisciplinary approach illuminates similarities in human behavior across time and space, provides methods for identifying killings as massacres, and helps today's societies learn from patterns of the past. Contributors: Cheryl P. Anderson | Cate E. Bird | William E. De Vore | David H. Dye | Julie M. Fleischman | Julia R. Hanebrink | Ryan P. Harrod | Keith P. Jacobi | Ashley E. Kendell | Krista E. Latham | Justin Maiers | Debra L. Martin | Alyson O'Daniel | Anna J. Osterholtz | Marin A. Pilloud | His Excellency Sonnara Prak | Tricia Redeker Hepner | Sophearavy Ros | Al W. Schwitalla | Dawnie Wolfe Steadman | J. Marla Toyne | Vuthy Voeun | P. Willey A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen

Table of contents

• Cover
• MASSACRES
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Rethinking Massacres: A Bioarchaeological and Forensic Investigation of Prehistoric Multiple Burials in the Tennessee River Valley
• 3. Forensic Perspectives on Massacres in Prehistoric and Historic Central California
• 4. Only the Men Will Do: A Bioarchaeological Exploration of Gender in an Andean Mass Death Assemblage
• 5. Applications of Coded Osteological Data from the Smithsonian Repatriation Database for the Study of Violence in the Past
• 6. Each One the Same: Performance, Demography, and Violence at Sacred Ridge
• 7. Bones in the Village: Fragmentary Human Bones and Scattered Contexts from the Crow Creek Village
• 8. Khmer Rouge Regime Massacres: Skeletal Evidence of Violent Trauma in Cambodia
• 9. Sowing the Dead: Massacres and the Missing in Northern Uganda
• 10. The Extended Massacre of Migrants: Exposure-Related Deaths in the Arizona Sonoran Desert
• 11. Migrant Death and Identification: Theory, Science, and Sociopolitics
• 12. Conclusion: What Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology Reveal about Massacres
• List of Contributors
• Index